Roe v. Wade Didn't Just Legalize Abortion: It Made It Our Constitutional Right

In addition, seven states passed laws prohibiting the use of telemedicine in the provision of medication abortion services. This strategy has proved safe, effective, and beneficial in Iowa, where women used to have to travel up to 200 miles to see a physician in person. Now they can meet with members of the staff at Planned Parenthood for an exam and information before communicating via computer monitor with a physician who can authorize the use of medications to terminate their pregnancy, an arrangement that saves women considerable time and money.

By requiring women to travel far from home and make multiple trips to a provider, these onerous new restrictions will significantly add to the economic, logistical, and emotional burden of obtaining an abortion – putting abortion completely out of reach for some women.

Hard Economic Times Burden Women’s Access

The “Great Recession” officially ended in June 2009 but women continue to feel the fallout from the economic downturn. Our office and network of grassroots abortion Funds around the country heard from more than 120,000 women who needed financial assistance to pay for an abortion last year.

A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust shows that many women are falling out of the middle class, especially women without a college degree, unmarried women, and divorced women – and Pew conducted this survey before the recession, suggesting that even greater percentages of women may be experiencing dangerous downward mobility. Indeed, the latest Census data paint a stark picture of life in the United States: nearly half of all people are either living in poverty or scraping by on low incomes. Seventeen million women live below the poverty line, which the Census Bureau defines as an annual income of less than $11,344 for an individual and $17,374 for a family of three. African American, Latina, and Native American women, as well as single mothers, have fared the worst.

Women were less likely than men to lose their jobs during the recession, but have gained almost none of the new jobs created during the economic “recovery.” And layoffs in the public sector have hit African American women especially hard, as they are more likely than any other group of women to hold government jobs.

It’s a fact of life that in order for women to have some control over their reproductive lives, women will always need access to abortion. Although overall abortion rates have declined in recent years, they have increased among increased among poorer women. Women of color, who are disproportionately low-income and therefore more likely to be insured by Medicaid, have the highest rates of unintended pregnancy and consequently of abortion. These trends speak to ongoing inequities in access to health information and health services that would make it easier for women to plan their pregnancies.

Most private health insurance plans cover abortion; however, not enough women have the kind of jobs that provide health insurance. If they did, they would already have better access to the contraception and related health services they need to prevent unintended pregnancies – basic services which are under attack by political conservatives.

Although health care reform will ultimately give more women access to Medicaid, that won’t include abortion care in most states, leaving women in the same situation they find themselves in today: having to scramble to come up with hundreds of dollars to pay for an abortion. Some women never manage to raise the money, finding that every time they think they have enough, their pregnancy has advanced and they need more cash. One in four women enrolled in Medicaid who wants to terminate her pregnancy is unable to obtain an abortion because of the Hyde Amendment.

Doesn’t every woman deserve to make her own decision about whether and when to have a child?

Megan J. Peterson is the Deputy Director of the National Network of Abortion Funds. Rachel Roth is the Director of Communications and Foundation Support at the National Network of Abortion Funds. The post is theirs.

[Ed Note]

Constitutional “originalists” who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted based on what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have declared the ordinary meaning of the text to be should be reminded that Roe found that

at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today. At least with respect to the early stage of pregnancy, and very possibly without such a limitation, the opportunity to make this choice was present in this country well into the 19th century.

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And because we believe that every woman deserves to make her own decision about whether and when to have a child, the National Network of Abortion Funds is joining an online mass mobilization along with over 70 other reproductive justice, reproductive rights, and reproductive health groups to deliver the message to elected officials that Americans trust women to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives.